TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Nokia, known for its religious-like devotion to the Symbian operating system, may be working with Microsoft to develop new phones running the Windows phone OS instead.

Nokia and Microsoft have begun talks to make Nokia-branded smartphones running the Windows Phone 7 OS, according to Eldar Murtazin, editor in chief of Mobile-Review editor. (Murtazin is known for gaining early access to the Nokia N8 phone long before its release, which led Nokia to file a report with the Russian police).

If true, adopting Windows Phone 7 could work well for Nokia, whose Symbian OS is outdated compared to more user-friendly Android-powered phones and Apple’s iPhone. Critics have called the Symbian OS “broken.”

The Windows Phone 7 strategy, as I’ve reported before, is more thought out than Google’s. Rather than simply license the OS to any manufacturer, Microsoft is requiring OEMs to adhere to a standard set of hardware features for any phone running Windows Phone 7. (Each phone must have three buttons, for example, and include a Snapdragon processor.)

What would Nokia get in return for playing by Microsoft’s rules? As part of the negotiation, manufacturers get a few default tiles on the Windows Phone 7 home screen devoted to the OEM’s proprietary applications; the rest of the space goes to Microsoft’s default apps (phone, calendar, etc).

Often the best kitchen gadgets are the cheapest, or at lest the most basic. Royal VKB and Nikolai Carels’ Boomerang Wok, though, tries to make the case that fancier can sometimes – almost – be better.

A cheap, carbon-steel wok from your local Chinese supplies store is the best wok you can get. It’s tough, it has a rounded bottom for gas (the only place you’ll get it hot enough) and it skips non-stick coatings, which burn-off or go bad at the kind of temperatures a wok likes.

My HTC Evo, a traveling journalist’s workhorse, got me busted in open court.

It was the first day of the Xbox modding trial in Los Angeles last week, which I was covering for Wired.com. The reason wasn’t that the phone’s ringer sounded in federal court — I’ve been in too many courtrooms to make that mistake.

Blame it on my Evo’s Wi-Fi hotspot, which prompted U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez to suddenly halt proceedings in the first-of-it’s kind hacking trial.

Apple has put in the request for its Asian partner Foxconn to produce and ship the second-generation iPad within 100 days, with plans for a spring 2011 release, according to a Taiwanese publication.

Foxconn was notified of plans to ship the iPad by February 2011, with initial shipments of 400,000 to 600,000 units, according to DigiTimes. Sources expect the product to launch April 2011.

This timing is plausible because the original iPad hit stores in April this year.

Next year, buyers of the Lexus LFA sports car will be even safer, thanks to a new kind of seatbelt designed by Takata Corp. The belt looks like any other, but contains an airbag that will inflate in case of a crash.

The belt is called the AirBelt, and will find its way into Toyota’s car under the much more boring name of “SRS Seat Belt Airbag”. The belt contains a bag inside its webbing, which is fired on impact by a gas-canister down by the buckle. The resulting bag protects the head and shoulder from side-on crashes, and also gets between the head and shoulder to stop sideways whiplash injuries.

The Cowon 3D is, as you may have worked out, a 3D-capable personal media player (PMP). But who cares? Much more interesting is that this palm-sized, 4.8-inch movie-player has full 1080p video-output via HDMI, making it a rather compelling device for the movie-buff.

Here are the rest of the specs: That little screen has a resolution of 800 x 480, and as well as movies you can browse the web via Wi-Fi, read ebooks, play music and watch photo slideshows.

Microsoft is looking to expand its Silverlight web platform to Xbox 360, according to a recent job advertisement placed by the company.

“Silverlight is looking to hire motivated developers with a passion for creating ground breaking multiscreen platform experiences now targeting the Xbox,” the advertisement reads. Silverlight is used in “thousands of applications developed for Windows Phone 7, social network applications such as Seesmic, or powering the largest premium internet movie service through Netflix.

The feel of a print book in your hand is largely a function of its cover; it turns out, Kindle cases are exactly the same. Two new third-party cases do their best to imitate the look and feel of a hardcover book, but take very different approaches in doing so.

The first is by DodoCase, makers of a popular iPad case who’ve brought the same traditional bookbinding aesthetic to a Kindle 3 case, just announced today.

From a distance, the Kindle DodoCase looks almost exactly like a Moleskine notebook, but the exterior is a stiff black faux leather.

Hey, Panasonic, take a look over here. This is how you upgrade a successful, well designed camera. You add almost no changes, boosting the maximum ISO from 3200 to 6400, for example, and perhaps tweaking the color and shaving some weight to make it look a little different from its predecessor. What you don’t do is take possibly the best camera you ever made (GF1) and dumb it down until it is little more than a point-and-shoot with interchangeable lenses (GF2).

Instapaper, our favorite iOS web reading application, works because it recognizes both the strengths and weaknesses of your device — something most websites either don’t or can’t consider. Just-released version 2.3 provides a terrific example of this in the new way it handles nighttime reading.

Impresario Marco Arment, who recently left his job at Tumblr to work on Instapaper full-time, outlines the changes on the Instapaper blog. Here, I’m going to highlight just one, because I think it’s both very cool and a good illustration of this problem of working within constraints of both a device and a platform.